Affordances, Dynamic Experience, and the Challenge of Reification

Why is it that affordances have received attention within psychology only in recent decades if they are supposedly what individuals perceive most fundamentally? This paradoxcanbeexplained,inpart,bythefactthatpsychologistshaveusuallyconsidered the character of perceiving from a detached stance, and then reified the results of this analysis—an error that William James called the psychologist’s fallacy—rather than attending to the immediate flow of perception–action. By the same token, if ecological psychologists were to take stimulus information as what is perceived, rather than as part of a conceptual framework offered to explain how we perceive, they would be committing a similar reification error. Ecological optics as a conceptual framework is always open to revision, even while the reality of affordances is assumed. Bearing in mind this distinction between what is perceived and how it is perceived, investigators need to return regularly to immediate experience, both as a means of verifying that our concepts connect back to our experience of the world and as a way of uncovering new qualities of perceptual experience for investigation. From this perspective, several exemplars of phenomenologically driven perceptual research are examined. Furthermore, the multidimensionalityofaffordancesisconsidered,withanemphasisontheirplaceinthe flow of immediate experience, development, and sociocultural processes. Theoretic knowledge, which is knowledge about things, as distinguished from living or sympathetic acquaintance with them, touches only the outer surface of reality. —William James (1909/1996, pp. 249–250) If James Gibson is correct, that we experience the environment in terms of its affordances, then why have affordances so easily eluded the attention of experimental psychologists over the years? As the supposed ground of all perceptual ex-